There is a very industrious spider that has made her web across my patio door. She started it in July, and very carefully stretched it from a couple of inches into the screen of the door to a couple of inches into the brick of the wall.

Unfortunately for her, I have to open that door nearly every day to water the plants, or sit on the porch, or pick up the porch chair the blows over in storms. So nearly every day I’d split her admittedly rather shabby web in half. And nearly every day she’d repair it. And after the first couple of weeks we both stopped caring too much about the process. I no longer thought twice about opening the door, and she no longer freaked out or waited very long to get back to the business of building her web. She never seemed to care that if she’d moved the entire operation three inches to the left, her life would have been so much less tiring.

All this has set me to thinking. What are the things that I could shift three inches to the left in my life? Are there things in the library that we don’t feel we have control over, but that we actually do control, and that we could shift ever so slightly?

For me, for today, it means not getting too emotionally involved in stuff, and taking a walk over my lunch break, and sending off an email I’ve been dreading for no good reason.